Led zeppelin
Led zeppelinLed Zeppelin
Hollywood, 1973. It was only the second day of Led Zeppelin's stay in Los Angeles. Already, the word was out. Hordes of fans prowled the hallways of their hotel, the infamous Continental Hyatt House. The lobby was filled with photographers, groupies teetering on platform heels, even an impatient car salesman who'd come to deliver a hot-rod to drummer John Bonham.
The cold steel elevator door slid open to reveal the ninth floor. Two beefy security guards stood there, demanding a note of authorization. One had already reached in, ready to smash the button marked "lobby." Luckily, I had a note.
Nine floors up, there was no sense of the furor downstairs. Robert Plant, fresh from the shower, strode to the window of his suite and looked out at the billboards of Sunset Strip. He noticed the gloriously run-down hotel, the Chateau Marmont, where Zeppelin had first stayed upon their arrival in America back in 1968. Plant joked to Jimmy Page, the guitarist leader of the group, that his innocence looked like it needed a paint job.
Page had something else on his mind. A representative of their record company, he said, had just called to report that the sales of the new album, Houses of the Holy, were spectacular. Page had been officially told that Led Zeppelin were the biggest-selling group in the whole world. A silent moment of triumph passed between Plant and Page. Across the hall, an Al Green record played on Jones's portable stereo.
"Well," said Jimmy Page, turning to the visiting writer. "What do you want to know?"
I wanted to say "everything." As a fledgling journalist still working at a record store, I'd fought for the opportunity to cover Led Zeppelin for the L.A. Times. The band had provided the soundtrack for my own adolescence, but I kept that to myself. I had a notebook full of questions, and as our interview progressed, Page and Plant seemed to warm from their notoriously press-wary stance. In the coming years, they would invite me to tour with them. We conducted innumerable interviews. Not many journalists were ever offered a front-row seat to the Zeppelin experience, and years later my files are still bulging with volumes of transcripts and passionately-scribbled notes I can barely read.
The Zeppelin attitude had something to do with Peter Grant, their brilliant and imposing manager. A little bit to do with the wicked humor of Richard Cole, their road-manager. Something to do with John Bonham thundering down the aisle of the Starship, performing Monty Python routines. With John Paul Jones, lost in dry-ice, playing "No Quarter." It had a lot to do with Page and Plant, side-by-side, sharing a single spotlight, ripping through "Over the Hills and Far Away."
The reverberations from those days run through most of what passes for rock and roll in the 1990's. Led Zeppelin has never been more popular, more pervasive, more...omnipresent. They broke up ten...
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